Noel's Scrabble Tips

Tips for More Advanced Players
- Tile-Turnover

Generally, the advice of the top players is that, the
more letters you play, the more you will get to pick out
of the bag, and the fewer will be the letters you leave
for your opponent. You have more chance of picking-up
the "goodies", and, statistically, it can be shown that
the player who wins is, more often than not, the one who
has played the most tiles. However, whilst such a
strategy may be fine for those players who have armed
themselves with the sort of vocabulary which easily overawes
the rest of us (they can expect to be able to deal with
just about any horrible combination of letters that Lady
Luck is ready to throw at them) it may, for the rest of
us, do more harm than good. It is, indeed, the very
antithesis of good rack management, since, most of the
time, your rack will be completely out of control,
consisting, almost entirely, of the letters that you
have just picked, randomly, out of the bag.

Therefore, unless you have the time to learn the entire
OSWI, you should not embrace this strategy without
coupling it with some degree of common sense. By all
means, when there is nothing on your rack worth keeping,
and when the score on offer, or the scoring opportunities
that you are giving away, are not prejudiced by playing
the longest word available to you, then go-ahead; choose
turn-over, and increase your chances of getting those
tiles which are likely to make all the difference.
But, once your rack starts to show promise, in the
direction that your word-learning is best-equipped to
exploit, be ready to start to make more compromises,
away from turn-over, and towards good rack management.
If your compromises lead to your clearing your whole
rack more often than you otherwise would, then the
chances are that you will, after all, be the player who
plays the most letters, anyway!